Henry Threadgill

Such a welcome book to someone like me: a nonmusician who loves listening to jazz but couldn't read or play a note if his life depended on it. It includes great explanations of the artistic temperament and process, plus a lifetime's worth of fascinating encounters and stories well related. The whole section about Threadgill's time in the army and Vietnam is by itself a five-star book. But that is only one important, but minor, theme in this autobiography.

For a different sort of show more autobiography, I might complain that the author does not honor a reader's curiosity about his adult family life. He glancingly describes his major loves and the birth of children and then moves on. But this book, like its author, is first and last about the music and so drawing the curtain quickly on family life is understandable.

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